The global expansion of the Internet, along with advances in digital technology, has caused dramatic changes in the field of scholarly literature. These advances have provided for the rapid dissemination of information, combined with increased global participation in scholarly research, resulting in demand for increased speed in publishing scholarly literature. These advances have also resulted in the demand to transition from publishing scholarly literature in print format to electronic format, and attempting to meet the new expectations associated with providing publications in electronic format accessible through the Internet.
Due to these dramatic changes, publishing professionals, such as authors, editors, and proofreaders, are under great time pressures, while also managing the quality of the publications. One area of publishing where these issues are prevalent is the formatting of bibliographic references in scholarly literature. The transition to electronic format has increased the expectation to provide accurately formatted bibliographic references, as it is now possible to electronically link related online content using the bibliographic references. However, formatting bibliographic references by hand is a laborious process and checking that the components of the formatted references are accurate takes even longer. Prior art publication systems provide methods for automatically formatting bibliographic references, but these systems cannot correctly identify and parse certain components of a bibliographic reference, such as author name groups, especially when errors exist in the presentation. As such, the prior art systems may output bibliographic references with their respective components in a non-standardized format, therefore, still requiring the laborious manual checking of the formatted references for accuracy. Thus, in the publication of scholarly literature, there is a need for a method that correctly identifies and parses components of a bibliographic reference, such as author name groups, and outputs a bibliographic reference in standardized format. This same need also exists in other areas of literature where other author related text strings, similar to author name groups, also need to be identified and parsed into standardized formats.